Titanfall set to drop without mod tools, Respawn to "evaluate" after launch

It's 2014, which means Titanfall finally makes its debut this year and not next year. With the shooter's March 11 release on the horizon, we now know we won't be seeing any PC mod or map tools launching with the game, according to a recent tweet from Respawn Entertainment co-founder Vince Zampella.

In one of his last messages of 2013, Zampella responded to a question about the possibility of getting modding tools alongside the game: "Not at launch for sure," he writes. "Will have to evaluate after launch."

It's a key detail for an entirely new shooter whose developer draws so much of its DNA from work on multiplayer-heavy games like Call of Duty, where individual maps become so integral to the experience and come to define much of what we think of when we play an FPS. We've also known for a while now that what Titanfall is attempting to do is fuse together a multiplayer game with story elements that would typically surface in a single-player campaign.

It's not clear yet how this mixture will play out in the game, but it's conceivable that this is a balance that needs to be carefully worked out, even if the game's potentially massive audience would likely love to take a crack at creating its own stories and settings. Since Zampella didn't rule it out entirely, we'll have to stay tuned.